A group of 83 Internet inventors and prominent engineers sent an open letter today to the members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We’re just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed “COICA” copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year’s bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.

Internet Censorship around the world

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

In the eve of the global Internet governance event hosted in Brazil, NETmundial, the Brazilian Senate approved the one-of-kind bill of rights for Internet users, known as “Marco Civil”. President Dilma Rousseff supported Marco Civil da Internet with firm commitment.

“Marco Civil could have a revolutionary effect on the current Internet policy environment,” Global Voices Advocacy editor Ellery Biddle wrote after the approval of the bill in the lower house of Congress, on March 25. Brazil is reaching a turning point while leading a pioneer role in the definition of Internet policies. The participatory process that was carried out for the creation and discussion of the bill -”driven by the public interest, as opposed to the interests of businesses or government” – surely adds perspective to the global multistakeholder meeting on the future of internet governance [by the multistakeholder process]

A sign of success of the Internet is the degree to which we take it for granted. Do you trawl Lifehacker and TechCrunch to find the next need-to-have social media tool or cloud service support for your professional or personal pastimes? You’re confident that there will be a next thing, even if you don’t quite know where it is going to come from. Perhaps it’s going to come from you – you are building the next great Internet-based service and are looking for Kickstarter funding to make it real. Who do you need to ask in order to set up the service and make it available over the Internet?

No one.

Of course, that assumes you have the technical wherewithal to build the system and the (financial) ability to put it on a server and network with adequate capacity to operate it. It implicitly suggests that you are building a technology and/or service that will operate within the bounds of existing norms – technical standards, operational practices, and local laws.

This is about fostering innovation, not prompting anarchy.

The phrase “permission-free innovation” is used to describe how the Internet differs from closed telecommunications networks, where only the local operators could build, deploy, and offer new services to their customer base, and that within a stringent regulatory (permission-requiring) regime.

To have some idea of the scope and impact that Internet characteristic has had, consider the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web we just celebrated earlier this year. I observed in a previous post, “The Web is the poster child for the “permission-free innovation” that the Internet has enabled. Sir Tim Berners-Lee did not have to ask a central authority whether or not he could write a client-server hypertext system. He wrote it; others who found the possibilities interesting downloaded clients and servers and started using it.”

In outlining the power of the OpenStand modern paradigm for standards development, IETF Chair Jari Arkko observed in an IETF blog post that the permissionless innovation principle is so core to the Internet’s technology that it is reflected in the approach to standards development that focuses on the importance of creating building blocks.

It’s not just about technology, though. Business has benefitted greatly from this approach, too. Quite honestly – if Mark Zuckerberg had to convince a business board of the sound financial case behind Facebook, would it have been supported as a productized service? Unlikely! It defined a whole new genre of online services that exceeded the imagination of others at the time.

Again, “permissionless innovation” is not about fomenting disruption outside the bounds of appropriate behaviour; “permissionless” is a guideline for fostering innovation by removing barriers to entry.

This topic is particularly timely as the most comments on the outcome document of this week’s NETMundial meeting in Brazil have been focused on this paragraph:

Enabling environment for innovation and creativity

The ability to innovate and create has been at the heart of the remarkable growth of the Internet and it has brought great value to the global society. For the preservation of its dynamism, Internet governance must continue to allow permissionless innovation through an enabling Internet environment.

Comments suggest that readers are interpreting the phrase as an attack on recognition of rule of law and existing intellectual property rights. As outlined above, that’s certainly not the context in which the term was introduced, years ago. Indeed, any serious look at how to handle intellectual property in the Internet age needs to look closely at the advantages brought by the Internet as a platform for innovation. The Internet Society remarked, in its paper on Intellectual Property on the Internet:

Comparably, when we talk about innovation without permission, we should not consider innovation that does not obey to any rules. Clayton Christensen, for instance, has argued that innovation could largely raise the probabilities of success if it complies to four rules: 1) taking root in disruption, (2) the necessary scope to succeed, (3) leveraging the right capabilities and (4) disrupting competitors, not customers. So, when the supporters of the open Internet talk about innovation without permission they refer to the ability of those who want to market new technologies to do so without having to further justify them according to existing business or other related standards. For example, the US Supreme Court has taken a similar view in Sony v. Universal Studios, Inc., where it asserted that new technology innovators do not “carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established”. We can, therefore, surmise that it is primarily the open architecture of the Internet that encourages innovation – we can call it “open innovation”.

This is a loop we don’t want to close — having come so far from the closed telecommunications networks that defined the last century, let us not undermine the Internet as a platform for innovation – technology, business, content – by taking that permissionless nature for granted.